Whether you're playing a game or watching a video, VR lets you step inside a new
world and become the hero of a story. But what if you want to tell a story of
your own?

Producing immersive 3D animation can be difficult and expensive. It requires
complex software to set keyframes with splined interpolation or costly motion
capture setups to track how live actors move through a scene. Professional
animators spend considerable effort to create sequences that look expressive and
natural.

At Daydream Labs, we've been experimenting with ways to reduce technical
complexity and even add a greater sense of play when animating in VR. In one
experiment we built, people could bring characters to life by picking up toys,
moving them through space and time, and then replay the scene.

As we saw people play with the animation experiment we built, we noticed a few
things:

The need for complex metaphors goes away in VR: What can be
complicated in 2D can be made intuitive in 3D. Instead of animating with graph
editors or icons representing location, people could simply reach out, grab a
virtual toy, and carry it through the scene. These simple animations had a
handmade charm that conveyed a surprising degree of emotion.

The learning curve drops to zero: People were already familiar
with how to interact with real toys, so they jumped right in and got started
telling their stories. They didn't need a lengthy tutorial, and they were able
to modify their animations and even add new characters without any additional
help.

People react to virtual environments the same way they react to real
ones: When people entered a playful VR environment, they understood it
was safe space to play with the toys around them. They felt comfortable
performing and speaking in funny voices. They took more risks knowing the
virtual environment was designed for play.

To create more intricate animations, we also built another experiment that let
people independently animate the joints of a single character. It let you record
your character’s movement as you separately animated the feet, hands, and head —
just like you would with a puppet.

VR allows us to rethink software and make certain use cases more natural and
intuitive. While this kind of animation system won’t replace professional tools,
it can allow anyone to tell their own stories. There are many examples of using
VR for storytelling, especially with video and animation, and we’re excited to
see new perspectives as more creators share their stories in VR.